Co-ops are often dismissed as attempts to create islands of socialism. But building democratically controlled tech infrastructure can be part of a wider movement for working-class power.
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This is a very long wall of text with very little information in it.
Three questions:
- Whats the actual goal?
- Can cooperative compete with regular comapnies?
- Can it resist the issues that plague large corps?
Yeah, this shit. We CAN use capitalism against itself. Why the fuck aren’t we doing more of it? Nothing is stopping us from creating industrial collectives. Crowdsource that shit!
We need better financial tools to allow employees to take out loans to purchase companies from owners and form worker cooperatives.
I know of some examples of employees that purchased from owners:
- Sexy Pizza in Denver
- Pizza Shuttle in Milwaukee
The availability of capital for this type of organization, the capital concentration on the opposing side and its market power is what’s holding us back.
If only there were a way to seize the means of production and redistribute the wealth…
Added a bit on that. 😊
This is why this battle has to go on multiple fronts. One is creating coops where and when possible. The other is unionizing existing corpos to gain labour power that can be leveraged to curb the oligarch’s power. The third is fighting at the political level for state funding for coops and labour rights.
I can get down with that
I’ll be really interesting to see how people try to hide the source of their wealth / power in a world where everything is co’oped.
Yeah I know. :(
In some places it’s fairly common. Check out this network of 257 cooperatives in Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Too few places. There’s a cluster in Italy as well.
Which one(s) are you referring to?
Maybe some of these ones?
Why the fuck aren’t we doing more of it?
Because we’re stupid.
Because we’re stupid.
Italy does this! They have a strong worker commune culture on the region they make the parmesan cheese at.
Co-ops are often dismissed as attempts to create islands of socialism
I’m sold! When do we start?
I’m in a very rural part of the USA. My electric, telephone(landlines which I don’t have), and internet are all coops. They are all very efficient and inexpensive. I’m very happy with them.
That should be the norm everywhere
Right now. Just grab some of your friends and sign onto contracts to buy and share things together.
Food coops are the most common. I imagine tools would also be pretty easy to jointly own.
Just grab some of your friends
That would require friends…
One of the universe’s cruelest jokes is that many of the people who truly could improve society have social anxiety and struggle to band together.
But we can fix that. As an anxious weirdo myself, I’m happy to be friends with the rest of you anxious weirdos. As long as we don’t meet in person until after we get to know each other well. But until then, introduce yourself here and tell me your favorite Linux distro. We’ll start a tech co-op.
co-ops are great especially for fresh foods. You buy in bulk and split between families. Something like half a dozen and buying fruit by the crate makes sense. along with like buying a whole cow.
